A quick update to say that a new game is on the Apple iOS AppStore.
Kyle Comet is a young space hero that I once wrote a story about and self published. You can find it on Amazon here. (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Planet-X-Mark-Wilcox/dp/1326413090)

I always wanted to create a series of games featuring a young space cadet type hero.

The premise of the game is pretty straight forward; shoot, jump and collect the goodies. I guess it’s an endless runner in that there is no structure to the game other than throwing obstacles down in front of you as you run.

This is deliberate. Akari took a lot of work in developing the level structures and writing the tools to craft all of that. I wanted a break from that style of development.

Jetpack Joyride provided a little inspiration for Kyle. It’s a game I’d played and enjoyed for some time. Even down to the cute and cartoony visuals. But my visual style is more of a pixel art style.

With The Toxic Laboratory I wanted every element to be fun.

The jump > shoot dynamic was something I’d used before and enjoyed. It allows for the game being operated with a single tap to the screen. As you tap the character jumps and shoots simultaneously. The first tap is a tiny jump but if you follow it up quickly with a second tap the character effectively takes off.

Having mastered that dynamic I drew a jetpack onto the character’s back and added smoke puffs to help illustrate the action.

Once Kyle’s character is off the ground you can ‘fly him’ for quite a stretch. Which is pretty cool as there’s plenty of floating goodies to collect.

A follow up to The Toxic Laboratory is in development just now; Kyle Comet and the Lost Moon. The Lost Moon adds platforms and more of a platformer mentality to the action.

If you were a kid in the late 1970s and early 1980s you’ll no doubt remember the wonderyears of the videogame arcades. The thrills of the new technology that provided hours of fun for us young gamer geeks was mesmerising.

These were the Star Wars years. Science fiction had finally become mainstream and was in the mind of every kid. To be able to visit the arcades and drop a coin to blast everything to hell was the ultimate thrill. We were all Luke Skywalker and Han Solo.

But what was it about those days, the games and their magic that endures and why have we built our business around maintaining the ethos of those early, pioneering days in gaming?

Nostalgia?

This isn’t nostalgia. That’s important. Nostalgia is a fine thing but for us it’s much, much more than that.

Sure there’s a buzz in reliving and recreating the game thrills of our youth. There’s always an inevitable thrill in regressing as you get older. But the key thing here is that there are aspects to ‘retro’ gaming that are entirely relevant to the modern mobile gamer. Not least the ability to be able to pick up a game, have a ‘go’, succeed or fail and then put the game down in the knowledge that next time you pick it up the same challenges will be presented to you without the added blag of being repeatedly sold to.

Better yet you can be sure to test yourself against your (and your friends) past achievements via such mechanics as a high score table or achievements matrix.

It is indeed a decidedly retro thing. There’s a charm to it that has been somewhat eroded over generations of advancing technology. The limitations of a colour palette and small screen resolution forced some ingenious design decisions and pushed the artist in particular, into creating some wonderful effects.

Retro for us is Defender but it’s also Out Run or even Doom. Retro for you may be more relatively recent titles such as Grand Theft Auto 3. It matters not. The point is that there was a charm in the ingenuity of designing within limitations be they graphical or processor.

Mobile devices are phenomenally powerful in terms of their graphical capability and raw horsepower, but they come with their own challenges for designers in terms of their physical size and limited control options. This, for us, is hugely attractive as designers and artists.

We want to try and map aspects of the classic arcade game experience onto modern mobile gaming.

Annoyances

The modern game scene is driven by the desire to sell once and sell again actually within the game experience. We don’t much like this trend. Not necessarily because it wasn’t prevalent in the ‘golden days’ (you can be sure that if it was possible back then it would have been done) but because it’s a distraction from the thrill of the game.

Monetising your games is important from a business sense but ramming it down your audience’s throat is ugly and unattractive. If there’s one thing that annoys us as gamers it’s sitting down to enjoy a game only to be presented with a full screen advert and a tiny (X) to close and progress. For us it then becomes less about you the gamer and more about ‘we’ the business trying to earn a buck.

If there’s another thing that annoys us it’s not being able to get into a game without the tiresome ‘this is how you play the game’. You’ve seen it before, you click PLAY and then you have 5 minutes of a greyed screen with highlighted pointers for how you actually play the damned thing.

Then, if all of that isn’t bad enough, you’re playing your game in the company of a 1/5th screen height persistent advert.

It’s ugly, intrusive and not at all what we want as gamers. As gamers we want to play. Pure and simple. We have our game and we want to play it and use our own intelligence and intuition to get us through.

Identifying these things was key to establishing our plan, or promise, if you like.

Our promise

So our ethos, our promise to the gamer, is that you will pay once for the game (£0.99, for example) and then play without any interference as many times as you like.

In the first two weeks of release we’ll likely offer the game free of charge. Following that initial free period we’ll charge a small fee for the game. We’re not Sega or Namco so won’t be asking for the usual £10.99 to recoup the enormous associated costs of development and marketing.

Staying true to the arcade ethos

True arcade games should not be so complicated as to require lengthy tutorial stages.

Many mobile games are of course fairly complex and warrant a tutorial of some kind. But even then it’s not as though you’re paying to play each time and have somebody breathing down your neck waiting for you to finish. Just wade in and figure it out! I personally often think that tutorials in games are a waste of dev effort and more a product of the heavy-handed marketing department who’ve seen such things in the competition.

“They do it so we should do it!”

It’s nonsense.

Most arcade games had an ‘attract mode’. It was a cut away from the title screen that offered a brief look at the game in action. Attract mode was designed to pull you in and have you spend your hard earned 10p. The cartoonist in me often imagines rows of agitated and excited arcade cabinets beeping, flashing and bouncing to get your attention :)

In many respects the iOS App Store is like a videogame arcade. You’re generally looking for a game to spend your gamer budget on (take a chance on). If the game is free to download there’s no risk, you’re not taking much of a chance!

Screenshots and ratings go a long way to attracting you. Ratings is not too dissimilar to word of mouth. If there was enough positive buzz about a game you’d hear it either amongst your friends or in passing whilst you wander the arcade. If there’s plenty of people stood around the cabinet you can be sure there’s something attractive on offer.

Similarly, if a game has merit you’d read about it on social media, gaming websites or hear about it amongst your gamer peers.

Sifting through the negative feedback and filtering out the ‘it crashes on my phone’ comments should leave you with enough information to persuade your purchase.

Marketing your games is vital and something for a future post. But for now let’s assume you can generate a healthy enough audience for your game on the app stores.

Attract mode translates into the preview video. Gamers are keen to see the game in motion before they commit. Both the iOS and Google stores offer a video preview. This is our opportunity to attract gamers based on the actual game. Flashy, over produced videos that show little or nothing of the game fail here in an instant. Rule 1: show the game in action! Show the promise to the gamer.

Genres and development challenge

We tend toward shoot em ups. It’s just our thing. We loved them all from Space Invaders and Defender through to Raiden, Outzone and Ikaruga. But we’re by no means limited to that genre. The key for us is in the visual style that we can achieve. The graphical potential of a game is a huge draw for us. If we can see a sizeable challenge in the code and art the project will often gain enough momentum to move into development.

The best projects are built on top of a number of key challenges.

From the developer’s perspective it may boil down to the tools that need to be created to build game specific levels. Our current project, Akari, started out as a scrolling shooter that quickly evolved into something that required staging and good level design. Our in-house level editor Neo was adapted to construct such challenges.

The artists and developers work closely to translate design goals into game features.

The time between developments is fun. We enjoy pulling together game concepts, graphical ideas and any other ideas for making a cool mobile game experience. But we never lose sight of our ‘promise’ – that our games will be all about instant accessibility and fast-paced thrills.

We also want to provide a consistent and level playing field. This is why we reject in-app purchases. Mechanics like that immediately offer an uneven playing field.

Social media

Embracing social media is almost essential in succeeding in modern mobile gaming. Testing yourself against your friends and then sharing those achievements on Facebook, Twitter et al is an increasingly important aspect to the game experience.

We’re keen to explore this without intrusion and are looking to integrate Apple’s Game Center and Google’s Play Games in all future games, for example.

It was always a thrill back in the day to visit the arcade and stand in front of your favourite game to see if your score was still top of the tree. Heaven forbid you should be displaced. Nothing would motivate you more than to see somebody else’s 3 character moniker sitting proud above you.

It was actually pretty frustrating to see an unfamiliar moniker sitting immediately above you. We’re convinced that challenges between friends is the way forward. We all want to brag our achievements to those buddies we know we can communicate with.

Conclusion

Modern mobile gaming is hugely enjoyable. The games are staggeringly attractive and full of style. Despite game companies insisting that mobile games are much more than ‘casual’ we feel that actually this is exactly what they are.

To that end, for us, the best games offer instant action and a great challenge with the ability to replay to your heart’s content without ever being pulled away from the game experience.

The golden years of arcade gaming perfected the art of offering such experiences which makes classic arcade gaming entirely relevant to the modern mobile gamer.

Like this:

Akari is a game that we’re currently thrilled to be developing here at Space Monster Games. It takes its lead from classic early 1990s shoot em ups such as Raiden and Outzone. Though the visual style is developing nicely we’re still hard at work creating some cool graphics and effects to keep you entertained for many, many levels.

More about the young hero of the game, Akari, and her backstory will follow in future posts. We hope you enjoy the video.

In our last game, Thundergun, we adopted a purely randomised approach to generating the levels. That is, the alien formations were predefined prior to the game loading but their formations for completely random.

For our next game, Akari: Battlestar (working title), we’re looking to plan the action with far more precision.

Our inspiration for this game is from the early 1990’s and games like Raiden.

Raiden was a tough game. Very tough. Our game will hopefully be a little more forgiving in the style of what were once referred to as manic shooters. Do Don Pachi epitomised this style in which you pitched your fighter against hordes of formation-based adversaries who sprayed bombs (with some elegance) around the screen. Under normal circumstances avoiding the bombs would be nigh on impossible. But this genre used much tighter collision detection; often using just a single pixel in the centre of the player’s ship for collision reference.

We’ve already adopted a similar approach.

But it’s the fighter formations we’re keen to establish up front by way of an in-house level design system. The placement of aliens, cannons, collectables, mini bosses, tanks; you name it, will be handled by this system. Each entity will have all attributes defined and the resulting output stored in a JSON format to be read by the game.

The attack formations for Thundergun were based largely on Capcom’s 1943.

Fighters swooped in, curled around and then flew off. If you took the entire formation down you were presented with a bonus item.

For Akari we want to have a lot more variation.

Fighters will adopt one of several attack formations.
e.g.

Drift down from the top of the screen, pause, fire, drift off to the side

Drift in from the side, fire bursts, drift off to the side

(Tanks) trundle in from the side and follow a set path

Squadron formations from the bottom of the screen that fly off screen and return in slow formation

For Thundergun we introduced the concept of a game progress ticker. In code this was defined as part of the global namespace g{} and referred to as g.progress

g.progress bumps with every tick of the game’s main loop. This is consistent and in tune with everything else that the game loop handles (movement, animation, collision etc) so it’s a good base for defining the introduction of alien formations.

As g.progress counts its way through to several thousands for each level it passes what we refer to as waypoints. As each waypoint is triggered a new randomly but predefined alien formation is spawned.

The difference with Akari is that there will be no randomisation. Everything will be delivered from a level data file.

At set intervals in Thundergun the action was interspersed with a mini boss; a larger fighter that drifted into view and bullied the player. Formations continued to spawn around it.

For Akari we’ll suppress the formations and halt the bumping of g.progress while the mini boss action plays out.

With the mechanics for the mini boss developed we have pretty much 90% of the code written to handle a proper end-of-level boss. The main difference will be in defining the scale of the boss and any sub-elements such as wing-mounted cannons.

Level structuring isn’t a new thing for us. We’ve employed it for our platform games and the C64 style shooter Crossfire.

Hopefully we can get a demo up and running in the near future. Exciting times in arcade game development!

It’s always easier to make decisions when you’re armed with data.
This morning we pulled down some stats from Apple’s reporting site to pore over the numbers.
(We don’t currently publish to Google Play, though that will come soon)

To Charge or Not to Charge

We released an arcade game (Chaos Grid) to the App Store two weeks ago and initially offered it for free.
In a short space of time we’d had just over 800 installs. 95% of those came from Japan.

It’s easy to assume that this is an indication that the game would be successful if we charged for it.
So we did and opted for the lowest tier of pricing – 99p.

7 days later and we’ve had an additional 12 installs.
Less Apple’s cut that comes in at $8.06 (£6.40)

Our assumption was wrong.
There’s work to be done before we can consider charging for the game.

There are other ways to monetise the game.
In-app Purchasing and advertising being the obvious choices. But we reject these as they aren’t true to our ‘promise’ to the customer.

We’re doing this to ‘relive the thrills of the video game arcade’.
It’s our ‘Why?’, if you like.

So we gave it about 4 seconds worth of thought and switched it back to free of charge.
Overnight the installs are back into double figures.

I guess it’s far better to have the game installed on numerous iPhones and iPads than sat there on the app store gathering dust.
A number of things happen when the game is installed:

It gets played

Our brand is all over the game’s splash screen

It (potentially) gets talked about and shared

But there was something else that occurred to us; the Japanese market was up for these games.
When we uploaded the game to the store we selected to have it available in every territory but we have no control over the exposure in each territory. So that came as a pleasant surprise.

Localisation and Culture

The screenshots that we provided for the game’s entry on the app store contain text. English text (above).
Words such as ‘RETRO ACTION’ and ‘ARCADE THRILLS’.
I’d guess that these ‘calls to action’ are wasted on the Japanese audience. They are probably far more interested in the screenshots than any blurb we wrap around it.
iTunes Connect (the developer’s gateway to the app store) offers the ability to provide localised content. We could go to the trouble of translating any words into multiple languages. But is it worth it? Would those words significantly influence the viewer to become a buyer?
I doubt it.

Far better to offer something more culturally relevant.
In the west we appear to use the screenshot as the key persuader in the buying process for an unknown title.
It’s a lot like picking up an X-Box game in the store and immediately flipping it over to see a screenshot of the game on the back cover.
But in Japan consumers warm to specific imagery. Anime style imagery. It’s relevant to them and makes the game feel less ‘alien’. The Japanese are proud of their culture and appear to warm to any attempts to embrace it.

Like this:

We’re huge fans of the golden days of Atari. The box art was a huge inspiration and that wonderful feeling of being transported away from real life is something that we’re keen to evoke with our own games.

Take a look at this concept piece for some promotional artwork for our forthcoming arcade game Thundergun.

The art department are nerds for Atari box art and artists such as Steve Hendricks.

Like this:

Well it’s been a long, long time since we updated our blog. So it’s a real thrill to be able to announce that we’ve been working hard on making some new arcade games. But these games are a little different; they’re built using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 (as usual) but are also wrapped up and served to the iOS AppStore.

We’re currently using PhoneGap to do the bundling and it appears to be working just fine. There are issues with choppy performance but there’s a wealth of information out there to address this. Something for a later blog post.

So what’s Chaos Grid all about?

Well, it’s an homage to the earliest shooting games from the video game arcades of yesteryear. We took our love of Defender, Robotron, Galaxians and the 8-bit classic Gridrunner and built a game around their mechanics.

The screens above are the ones we use on the iOS AppStore and they pretty accurately depict the action. Though later levels become pretty frenetic!

If you’re a fan of the old school shooting genre and love those old beeps, whirrs, and electronic wind-up sounds then we’re pretty sure you’ll love the game.

Like this:

I’m not updating this blog often enough so I thought I’d just share some thoughts on a new game idea. The game is a straight forward arcade game though for me it’s a little odd as the primary focus isn’t on blasting and explosions. At least it isn’t yet! There’s time for that to change.

To get an idea for the style head over to my Playstar Arcade and play Night Bomber.
I’m loving getting back in to the pixel art style and sci-fi games like this lend themselves to it.

Like this:

Ever since my first foray in to browser gaming I’ve stuck to my goal of creating the kind of games that I enjoyed in my youth. Generally speaking this means classic “pixelled” sprites and the control of an on-screen character / spaceship / vehicle of some kind. Ideally I’d also throw in bombs, lasers and explosions a plenty. If I’m honest it’s also a pretty easy style of game to write.

I guess right now I’m wondering whether it’s right for me to continue to target this niche in retro gaming or whether I should move on a bit and challenge myself with a different genre.

There are benefits to maintaining a niche and also several drawbacks.The benefits clearly come in the form of brand association and search relevance. The more I can focus on writing about a specific area of mobile gaming the more I improve my chances of being returned favourably in Google et al.

But sticking to a niche also narrows my opportunities in the wider field of attracting work. Whilst I’m always going to favour working on my own projects and my own designs I can’t disregard the fact that there is some value in being a coder for hire.

Arcade games, the classic ones (which I guess we now refer to as retro arcade games), offer some wonderful pointers for achieving an optimum in designing games for casual mobile play.Arcade games almost by definition were games that you could play and access quickly and each “go” would last for little more than a few minutes. This is what your single coin gave you and if the experience was a good one you’d possibly sink another coin. If not you’d move on and find something else.This has real parallels with today’s online games scene. Especially the mobile web gaming scene.

HTML5 game portals tend to target mobile devices. The good sites are clean and optimised for display on the smaller screens. As such they are pretty straight forward to navigate around and generally uncluttered. The same cannot be said for the desktop equivalents which in many cases are more of an excuse to litter the screen with advertising than offer any kind of a gaming experience.

My stats continue to show me that my games are popular. When somebody visits the site they generally play around 3.2 games per session before they disappear. 6% of visitors exit via an advert. I’m not actually sure whether those 6% have enjoyed their time on the site and played that average 3.2 games or whether they’re simply hacked off with the experience and were looking for a way out. I guess there’s every chance this is the case.

Regardless mobile arcade games and mobile game design (HTML5 game design) continue to challenge my brain cells. I’m always thinking of new elements to games that I scribble down for later reference and often draw upon them when I’m thinking of the finer details of a game’s execution.

I use SNES and Arcade emulators (ZSNES and MAME) on a regular basis to research gaming styles, challenges, reward systems and every other vital element of a good gaming experience. MAME generally offers that throwback to the mind boggling and dazzling array of cabinets that beeped and zapped at me as I stalked the arcade for that perfect way to spend 5 minutes and 10 pence. I suppose it gets me in the mood :)The SNES games on the other hand are showing me the visual style that I’m aiming for. Especially in my most recent game Jumpin’ Jasper which was every bit a SNES inspired game.

I’ve not set out to find any magic solution here it’s really just a Sunday morning blog update with a coffee and some thoughts. I have to say that playing and designing retro-styled arcade games still thrills me. There’s a lot to be said for this.I may be missing a trick or two by not becoming a more high profile game developer but maybe that’s not for me.

An old manager once said to me “Stick to what you know by all means but do it well. Do it very well. Be the best at what you do well and above all enjoy it.”